J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Rush Limbaugh Changed America.

Before Rush, talk radio was different. Talk radio was about cotton candy issues. Larry King on the Mutual Broadcast Network hosted an overnight parade of callers talking about pets, childhood memories, landscaping, and just how they were doing. Scores of local talk show hosts – like Perry Marshall at KDKA in Pittsburgh – entertained with friendly chat, the sweet cotton candy that dissolves away quick into meaninglessness.

That was radio B.R. – Before Rush.

Running the board at WPBR on this August debut day, I could tell immediately this new brand of talk was revolutionary. It was listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time. It was the first ride on the looping coaster that defied gravity. It was bold and brash and, most of all, spoke to Americans about what America was. Rush spoke to what it means to be American, and what America means as an idea.

Rush was the “fairness doctrine” and mush mouth radio put out to pasture. On Saturday the week of Rush’s debut, I would produce a radio show called “Our Eyes” where the elderly called into the eye-doctor host to talk about vision issues.

That is the radio world Rush stepped into, on the same station in Palm Beach.

Before Fox News, before Drudge and the Blogosphere, Rush was America’s alternative news source, both quoting articles that he believed his massive audience needed to hear, and pushing back on what we would now call “fake news.” As Dan McLaughlin writes, “His death also marks the decisive end of another era: the post-Reagan, post–Cold War Right of the 1990s, in which he was a central figure.”